Thursday, July 28, 2011

Darwin’s captain: Robert FitzRoy

Robert FitzRoy (1805–65) entered the Royal Navy at age thirteen and, after passing exams with full marks, moved quickly up the ranks. In 1828, he became temporary captain of the Beagle, returning the ship to England in October 1830. The following May, FitzRoy stood unsuccessfully as Tory candidate for Ipswich. A few weeks later, the Beagle and her captain were commissioned for a second South American Survey.

Fitzroy knew that he was prone to bouts of morbid depression and was haunted by two recent suicides. The first was that of his uncle Viscount Castlereagh, a brilliant but controversial politician who, as Foreign Secretary, had helped bring peace to Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars (Shelley damns him in his brilliant Masque of Anarchy). In 1822, Castlereagh fell victim to a real or imagined gay sex scandal, claiming to the king that he was being blackmailed. His mind unhinged, three days later he slit his own throat with a letter opener.

The second incident occurred a few years later, during the Beagle’s first survey of the southern hemisphere under the command of Captain Pringle Stokes. In August 1828, during the gloomy southern winter, Stokes locked the door to his cabin, shot himself in the head, and then took an agonizing twelve days to die.

Mindful of these dangerous precedents, FitzRoy took Darwin along as his gentleman companion and changed the course of history. Nonetheless, FitzRoy did succumb to despair part way through the second Beagle journey, resigning his captaincy for a short while before being persuaded to resume command.

But FitzRoy was more than just a bit player in Darwin’s story. In the 1840s, he served as the Tory MP for Durham before serving disastrously as the second Governor of New Zealand – during his term, the colony almost became bankrupt and a new war broke out.

However, FitzRoy is justly celebrated for his pioneering contributions to meteorology: he invented the storm glass (a device for predicting the weather), developed new and improved barometers and invented weather forecasts and gale warnings for fisherman.

FitzRoy retired in 1863 with the rank of Vice-Admiral. But, at the age of sixty, the depression he had so feared aboard the Beagle finally caught up with him – one morning, FitzRoy got out of bed, went to his washroom and, echoing his uncle’s demise, slit his own throat with a razor.

The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s masterpiece The Origin of Species changed forever the way we think about life on Earth, but also the human condition. One hundred and fifty years later—and 200 years after his birth—Darwin's big idea has never been more relevant or more challenging. The Rough Guide to Evolution provides a readable introduction to evolution and its influence on almost all aspects of human thought.

Features include:

The life and works of Darwin.

The growth of evolutionary thought.

The evidence for evolution.

The evolutionary history of life on Earth and human evolution

How Darwin’s breakthrough is still denied by creationists.

The wider impact of evolutionary thinking on science and society—from physics and cosmology to Guinness ads and The Simpsons.

The Rough Guide to Evolution has been distributed to 6000 undergraduate students through the Great Read at Birmingham initiative.

About Me

I obtained my medical education from the University of Cambridge and the London Hospital Medical College. I completed my specialist training as a medical microbiologist at Bart’s Hospital in London. In the mid-1990s, while completing a PhD in molecular bacteriology at Imperial College, London, I led a team of students to victory in the national quiz show University Challenge. In 1999, I took up a chair in microbiology at Queen’s University Belfast before moving to a chair in Birmingham in 2001. I took up my current position in April 2013